ood--how dearly beautiful it was!--but Dicky seemed like a thing, as
Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put
us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him--not as from Jack, as from
an antagonist,--but because it could not touch him, any more than a
cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death;
and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is
recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he
received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity,
nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in
his epitaph--_O La!--O La! Bobby!_

MR. MUNDEN

Not many nights ago we had come home from seeing this extraordinary
performer in Cockletop; and when we retired to our pillow, his
whimsical image still stuck by us, in a manner as to threaten sleep.
In vain we tried to divest ourselves of it by conjuring up the most
opposite associations. We resolved to be serious. We raised up the
gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not
do.

--There the antic sate
Mocking our state--

his queer visnomy--his bewildering costume--all the strange things
which he had raked together--his serpentine rod swagging about in his
pocket--Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics--O'Keefe's wild
farce, and _his_ wilder commentary--till the passion of laughter, like
grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep
which in the first instance it had driven away.

But we were not to escape so easily. No sooner did we fall into
slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed us in
the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing
before us, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when
you have been taking opium--all the strange combinations, which this
strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance
into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the
town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power
of the pencil to have fixed them when we awoke! A season or two since
there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. We do not see why there should
not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not
fall far short of the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one face (but what a
one it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin
dow